Here is a fun technique to create rainbow colored roses by slicing the stem into different cups with food-colored water. This rose did not come out looking as pretty as the professional ones, but it still was fun.

Mentos Train - 3/30/13

Here's a video from my son's 4th birthday party. He wanted his birthday party theme to be "Thomas the Train", and I wanted to incorportate a science experiment, so I cut out a cardboard box to look like Thomas the Train, and then my son helped me paint it. Then I put a soda bottle where the smoke stack goes, and my son helped me drop Mentos into it to make a big splash at his birthday party.

This was my first attempt to make a three dimensional reflection hologram using a laser diode. The vibration isolation table (left photo) was a 150 lb. granite block sitting on top of four Sorbothane Vibration Isolators (NT55-244, $16). My friend machined the stainless steel mounts (right photo) for the laser diode and Double-Concave (DCV) lens (NT32-988, $18.50).

The left photo shows the holographic recording plate (PFG-03) with a Lego man behind it. The right photo shows the finished hologram but this photo doesn’t quite do it justice because it was hard to take a good picture with the camera I was using.

New Laser diode stand - 1/26/04

This laser diode stand was one of my machining projects. I have not used it yet. It will give the laser diode a complete 6 degrees of freedom.

This 38" x 50" Fresnel lens can focus sunlight like a giant magnifying glass. I think these are used for TV magnifiers. The focal point is blindingly bright and it burns quickly. I imagine this is what it must be like on the surface of Mercury (temperature: 662° F.) Boy, I’m just glad I don’t live on Mercury!

Penny - before and after. Pennies made after 1982 are 97.5% Zinc (melting temperature: 787.24° F.) This Fresnel lens is powerful enough to melt dimes which are 91.67% Copper (melting temperature: 1982.1° F.)

Here is a picture of some nice single slit diffraction from my 3 mW green laser pointer. This pattern was made by shining the laser through a tiny adjustable gap in a pair of calipers. One can easily calculate the light’s wavelength from this pattern: l = d x / L where d is the gap, x is the distance between each bright spot, and L is the distance from the wall.

In this experiment, we used a Langmuir probe to measure plasma electron density and temperature. In the left photo, you can see the purple plasma glowing inside the observation window. The drawing on the right summarizes what the overall crazy setup looked like. Click here to go to my high voltage page.

Here is a picture of me working with liquid helium which has a boiling temperature of 4.2 K (-452.1° F.). This was a fun experiment to study the lambda point of liquid helium and the superconducting properties of tin. The lowest temperature we reached was about 1.2 K (-457.2° F.).

Piezoelectric Motor Tester - 2003-2004

This was my undergraduate research project for my school’s experimental gravity program. Our goal was to test the equivalence principle, which states that the ratio of inertial to gravitational mass is the same for all types of matter. We sought to test this hypothesis by using an extremely sensitive cryogenic torsion pendulum composed of masses with differing neutron to proton ratios. This pendulum is located in an abandoned missile bunker in Washington.

My responsibility was to build a motor to rotate this pendulum. This was to be a very precise motor, composed of stacks of piezoelectric sheering plates. The above photos show a stack being tested at low temperature inside a vacuum can in a liquid nitrogen bath (-320° F.). The picture on the left shows some of my blueprints for this project.